That’s the only ending where someone dies the other “bad” endings are tragic due to the failure of Hisao and his partner to solve the issues in their relationships. There is also an alternate path where, if Hisao alienates everyone, he ends up ditching a major school festival to drink on the roof with his dorm neighbor, Kenji (who believes that this school is a ‘feminist conspiracy’), and soon falls off the roof and dies. If he does start dating, then the game’s subsequent acts either end with a “happy”/“good” ending for Hisao and his girlfriend, where they stay together and work through their challenges together, or a “sad”/”bad” ending where they can’t overcome their disagreements and differences, and break up with each other. Based on how the player goes through the game’s ‘act 1’-and I’ll discuss the game’s mechanics momentarily-Hisao either begins dating one of five girls at the school or antagonizes everyone and ends up with no one. (Or a mix of all of those, depending on which character and scene in the game.) Lastly, this game does contain adult content and sex scenes, although all subsequent content and screenshots below are safe for work. Secondly, I am not an expert on portrayals of disability in media and fiction and can’t speak with any sort of proficiency to whether or not Katawa Shoujo’s portrayals of disabilities are realistic or not, or sensitive or not. Given how the game’s narrative is so tightly wound up with its mechanics, as I’ll discuss soon, it’s not really possible to meaningfully talk about Katawa Shoujo as a romance, comedy, tragedy, or even a game without spoiling things. Firstly, this discussion will contain some major spoilers for Katawa Shoujo. īefore I continue, I want to acknowledge a few points.
Even the game’s opening credits use the usernames of the 4chan users as opposed to full names. Katawa Shoujo is defined by its official website as a “bishoujo-style visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located somewhere in modern Japan.” There are a couple of translations of the title circulating around the web, but the one that’s on the official website is “Disability Girls.” While the game credits its development to a company named “Four Leaf Studios,” that’s actually a name for a coalition of 4chan forum users, who created this game over the course of five years based on an illustration posted there in 2007.